Political Quotes

“It has been over 12 years since the last debate over trade promotion authority, the last time we considered the role of Congress in trade negotiations. Much has changed since then: the world has changed; trade negotiations have changed; and the role of Congress in trade negotiations has changed. We all recognize that trade can be beneficial. The issue is not whether Congress could pass an Econ 101 class, as President George W. Bush's chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, Gregory Mankiw, recently put it. The issue is whether we are going to face up to the fact that our trading system today is much more complex than the simplistic trade model presented in an Econ 101 class. A growing number of prominent economists today recognize those complexities, from Nobel Laureate economists like Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, to Columbia professor Jeffrey Sachs, former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson, and former White House adviser Jared Bernstein.…”